Here's how to turn a bar of titanium into a ring with LED-illuminated jewels that light up when they're near a power source. One: fall in love. Two: a bunch of other stuff. Three: boom, magic-ring.

Ben Kokes did all three of these things. The result was a ring with an inductive loop – a copper coil assembly, hidden inside – that causes the stones lining the outside of the band to light up when the ring comes within close proximity of an induced alternating magnetic field. Probably the coolest ring-related craftsmanship we've seen since that guy who forged his own wedding band out of a meteorite.

I started this idea in January 2013, and presented the ring to my fiance on May 2013. From the start, I had to learn AutoCAD, design and develop a circuit that would inductively couple power to the ring, and also how to understand the nuances of working with titanium. In that time, I made several test models and explored several options before coming to this design. The presented ring represents version 10 of the cut metal rings. The previous 9 models were stepping stones to understand behaviors, or test out theories of how to perform an operation. A good scientist knows to do qualitative tests! The most recently made ring (ver 10) is on the left. The top bar is titanium rod that was used as the ring base. The smaller rod is the aluminum that was used for initial drilling and sizing tests.